Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

‘No, the other one,’ Perlmann said and gulped.

‘And it occurs to me,’ she exclaimed and turned towards the office, ‘that I still have to give you the disk!’

As she opened up the box and started searching, Perlmann leaned against the doorframe with his arms folded. She’ll never find out.

‘I don’t understand this,’ she murmured, sat down and went through the disks again, slowly, one at a time. ‘It was in here, and now it’s gone.’ She looked through everything on the desk, smiling at him awkwardly from time to time. ‘I’m not usually as scattered as this.’ Distracted and incredulous, she went through the drawers, and you could tell by the wrinkles on her nose that she was battling against irritation with herself.

Suddenly, she made a dismissive gesture. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll just copy both texts for you quickly again.’ She turned on the computer and put a new disk in the drive.

At that moment Perlmann heard Leskov’s voice behind him. ‘Are we starting on time?’ He turned round. Leskov was wearing his bilious green shirt with a brown tie and a grey waistcoat stretched over his belly.

‘ Ecco! ’ Maria was saying, ‘so first we’ve got the text about memory… what abbreviation did I give it… oh, yes, that’s it.’

He doesn’t understand Italian . The sound of copying began. Perlmann looked at his watch for an unnecessarily long time. ‘Yes, we’ll have to be there in a minute,’ he said.

Leskov walked up to Maria and held out his hand.

‘ Un momento ,’ she smiled. ‘Now the other one. That was… yes, just Mestre .’ Her fingers flew over the keys. ‘ Ecco! ’ The sound again. Now she shook hands with Leskov, who was looking at the screen. ‘Good morning,’ she said in English.

‘Incredible how little time it takes,’ Leskov said raptly. Then he showed Maria the stack of copies that he was carrying under his arm. ‘The text from yesterday. Thank you very much, once again.’

As Leskov was leaving, Maria took the disk out of the drive and stuck a label on it.

‘Erm… you don’t need to do that,’ Perlmann said hastily as she reached for her pen. He slipped the disk into his jacket pocket. ‘Now you can delete the texts.’ His hoarseness and the quiver in his voice made it, he thought, the caricature of a casual remark.

‘I will at some point,’ she said and turned off the computer. ‘But there’s no rush. The computer has a huge hard drive!’ She got up and looked down at her folded hands. ‘You know, I hate erasing documents that I’ve typed up. All that work, and then one click of the keys – and poof!’ She threw her hands in the air and looked at him with a shy smile that he had never seen before. ‘I know it doesn’t make any sense really, because nothing happens to the documents in there once the people have gone… It’s just how I am.’

Perlmann nodded. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and tapped his jacket pocket.

Leskov had already distributed his handwritten submission, and was now sitting at the front moving his papers back and forth. He gripped his pipe bowl with both hands as he began to speak. He had already talked about the mishap with his text, he said. His tone revealed the fact that he had firmly resolved not to start talking about it again. But then, from one second to the next, his facial expression went blank, he rubbed his pipe absently with his index finger, and you could actually feel him being sucked into the pool of his attempts at remembering.

As he had done so often in this room, Perlmann hid his face behind his clasped hands as Leskov told parts of his story again. Quickly, and even though he didn’t try fully to understand the reasons why, Perlmann’s sense of guilt turned to fury: it had been a crazy, unforgivable act of recklessness to take such an important text, a text on which Leskov’s advancement depended, on a journey without making a copy beforehand! How could he do such a thing?

Even when Leskov was already some way into his lecture, Perlmann was still quarrelling with him. Until he suddenly stopped abruptly: What would have happened if he had told me about such a copy just before the tunnel? He took his hands from his face and tried to listen.

The others, with their sleepy faces, weren’t taking the Russian seriously. The contrast between the tie cutting into Leskov’s neck and Adrian von Levetzov’s unaccustomedly open collar was so vivid that Perlmann succumbed to fury once more. But this time it was a fury on behalf of Leskov, even going so far as to defend that horrible green shirt. Millar, who had never appeared in the veranda without his blazer, was wearing a windbreaker, and there was a camera on the table in front of him. And Evelyn Mistral, who had always listened to the others with her pen at the ready, was drawing circles with her folded glasses on her unopened pad. The only curious face belonged to Giorgio Silvestri.

In the discussion, Leskov was spared at first, and a patronizing benevolence was apparent. But by now Leskov had shed his self-consciousness, and surprised everyone with his doggedness. He stood by what he had said, and to Perlmann’s alarm he quickly went on the attack. There was nothing now of the anxiety with which he had sat facing Perlmann in his room the previous evening, like a student before his first presentation. Leskov’s attacks, in spite of their factual harshness, were prevented from being insulting or wounding, largely because his flawed English had a unique charm. Many of his turns of phrase, which weren’t quite accurate, had an involuntary comedy about them, which he only noticed when he saw himself reflected in the faces of the others. Then he laughed loudest of all. The victims of his attacks were often uncertain: had he meant it seriously? Or did he perhaps not know exactly what he had just said? Above all Achim Ruge, who seemed to have no sense of humor at all today, seemed bothered by this uncertainty, and when he took out a pack of aspirin, Laura Sand burst out laughing.

Leskov noticed the hesitancy on the part of the others more and more often, and more and more quickly. Then he repeated his reservation in different words, and in most cases the variation in expression showed that he actually had meant exactly what he had said. After some time the doubts of the others fled. His initial phrasing was taken seriously and the fact that linguistic expression as a theme in its own right had disappeared made the discussion more tart and direct. Evelyn Mistral was writing now, and Millar hung his camera over the back of his chair. The sickly sweet tobacco smell filled the whole veranda. Von Levetzov opened a window.

He, Philipp Perlmann, had been prepared, in cold blood, to murder that person up there at the front, who was now, brazenly and without the slightest vanity, keeping to the point. As he scribbled on the back of Leskov’s submission by way of self-disguise, Perlmann desperately sought a posture – an internal maneuver – that might save him from being totally suffocated by the feelings of shame and guilt that engulfed everything else. He tried to see Leskov only externally, as just a body, so to speak, and to concentrate on the things that repelled him: the sweat on his bald head, the bulges of his bull’s neck, his sausage fingers. It was a cheap, vulgar trick, and afterwards Perlmann’s shame was all the greater for it.

He, too, had to say something. And he couldn’t wait much longer. He shivered. The draught from the open window was suddenly icy. An athlete, he thought, must feel rather like that at his first competition after an injury. Over the bay the sun seemed to be falling against the low, milky cloud. The morning light grew softer. John Smith stood irresolutely at the edge of the pool. Millar pulled a mocking face at the sight of him.